


Thunder At Twilight

by vials



Category: Declare - Tim Powers
Genre: Gen, Paranormal, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-20
Updated: 2017-05-20
Packaged: 2018-11-03 00:12:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10955655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vials/pseuds/vials
Summary: A freak storm traps Elena and Andrew in a temporary shelter, where they quickly realise that what has them cornered is not just bad weather.





	Thunder At Twilight

The streets were darkening as Elena and Andrew made their way back from the small café they had been sheltering in for the last hour, when a freak and incredibly heavy rainstorm had swept over the city and drenched absolutely everything in its path. The streets shone and rivers of water still rushed down the gutters, making it sound as though they were walking by the riverside. Ordinarily it wouldn’t have bothered them – they couldn’t stop their lives for a bit of bad weather, after all – but they only had limited clothing available to them and neither of them fancied the idea of sitting around in damp clothing, especially not Andrew, who would be spending the night manning the radio. 

The air smelled of rain and as a result of the weather the streets were mostly deserted. They stuck to the more shadowed areas and the less frequented streets never the less, their feet splashing through the puddles. Somewhere in the distance thunder rumbled closer to them, and the sound was eerie in the stillness. Neither of them could remember there being a thunderstorm here before, and the air was, oddly, not as humid as one would expect for such weather. Elena glanced around constantly, making sure they weren’t being followed, and Andrew stuck as close to her as possible. If they approached a street with more people on it, he gently took her hand, and they ambled down the road looking like two lovers caught out late on a date. He could feel that she was nervous when he took her hand – it trembled lightly in his, and he knew she could feel the same from him.

“Why are you so nervous?” she asked in a whisper, as they moved down an empty street. Andrew didn’t let go of her hand, and she didn’t seem like she wanted him to.

“I’m not nervous,” Andrew said, his voice thankfully sounding just how it always did, and not betraying the fact that he felt more on edge than he had done in his life. “I guess I’m just a bit wired from the storm. Electricity in the air, you know?” He looked up, seeing the clouds were dark and swirling above them. They were growing darker as the night crept in deeper, and he was beginning to wish that they had just taken their chances with the damp clothes.

“You’re worried you’re going to be stuck by lightning?” Elena teased, but there was something missing in her voice; it had the kind of tone that came from an attempt to cover up nerves with a joke, and the attempt not working quite as well as it should have.

“Of course not,” Andrew said, playing along. “The chances of that happening aren’t very high. Not with all these tall buildings around. Do you get thunderstorms here often?”

“Not really,” Elena said, frowning. “Sometimes, but they’re nothing impressive.”

Another rumble of thunder reached them, low at first and growing louder, rushing over them as though a massive stone was being rolled through the clouds. Andrew thought he saw a flicker in the light around him, as though lightning had occurred somewhere high above them, but he couldn’t be sure.

“Can we risk picking up our pace a little?” he asked, before realising it sounded as though he were nervous, which he was, but he didn’t want to admit that. “I think it might start raining again,” he added quickly, in an attempt to cover it up. If Elena caught on to what he was doing, she didn’t say anything.

“It’s deserted, but I don’t think we should let that lure us into a false sense of security,” she said, before sighing. “I don’t even know if there will be any point tonight. If there’s an electrical storm, you probably won’t have much luck with the radio. Not to mention the fact that sitting up on a roof might not be the best place for you in a storm.”

“We’ll see how bad it gets,” Andrew said bravely. “I might still be able to. Unless you’d prefer I didn’t.”

“I don’t know,” Elena said, and she looked worried. Her eyebrows were creased slightly in concern; she was gripping Andrew’s hand a little too hard. “Let’s just get inside, first. Thunderstorms have always made me uneasy.”

They made it down the rest of the street they were currently on and halfway down the next, with the thunder growing louder the whole while. At times it was so loud that everything else paled in comparison; Andrew was sure that the windows rattled in their frames, and if Elena was speaking to him her voice was completely drowned out, despite the fact she was right beside him. She turned more frequently now, worried that someone might be able to sneak up on them when it was too loud to hear them; she couldn’t understand where the image was coming from, but she thought it felt as though she was in some corrupt version of the old childhood game she used to play, where somebody would close their eyes or face a wall and the others would have to sneak as close as possible, freezing whenever the person opened their eyes. She remembered how unnerving it had felt to be standing there, her back to everybody or her eyes clamped closed, her hands pressed over them, hearing the shuffling around her and not being able to see it; the jolt of shock that would go through her when someone finally won, reaching out of nothing and grabbing her without warning. She could feel her skin prickling as they walked, expecting a hand to reach out of thin air and grab her by the arm.

She looked over her shoulder once again and finally saw the lightning; a giant fork that stretched through the clouds above them, filling the whole sky with bright white lines and making it look as though they were standing beneath a shattered mirror. Feeling a sudden rush of terror she couldn’t explain, she grabbed Andrew by the arm and pulled him towards the row of flats to their left.

“Quick, Marcel!” she whispered, when he began to protest in confusion. She pulled him up into the doorway, where they were sheltered in a small porch area; it wasn’t very deep, meaning that there were only a few inches between where their elbows rested and the open street began, but already she felt a little better, just to be out of the storm’s gaze. Where _that_ thought had come from she had no idea, but it seemed to make sense: they were hiding from it.

“Did you see anyone?” Andrew asked, concerned.

“No, I—” Elena began, before breaking off, realising she didn’t know how to explain what had happened. “There was lightning,” she eventually said. “Did you see it?”

“Right over us? I couldn’t miss it.”

“I thought we had better get out of the way. You know, just in case it starts raining.”

“It looks pretty dry now,” Andrew said. “I thought it would have started sooner, actually – oh. There we go.”

The rain had begun as he had been speaking, as suddenly as if somebody had turned a switch on. One second there was nothing, and the next the street was a grey sheet, the hissing noise of the rain hitting the ground almost deafening. The two of them watched silently, with Elena occasionally glancing at Andrew’s face, trying to work out if he shared her unease. The rain bounced off the pavement and she felt spray on her hands and face; almost subconsciously she pressed herself a little further against the door, wishing she could knock and take shelter inside.

The storm worsened suddenly, the thunder and lightning appearing almost simultaneously, and Elena couldn’t believe how heavy it was raining. She could barely see a few feet outside of their shelter; the sky had darkened rapidly.

She looked at Andrew again, seeing he was facing the storm with something that looked like fascination. There was unease there, too, she thought, but mostly he seemed to be enjoying the show – she supposed he had never seen anything quite like it before, but even the thunderstorms of her childhood had never compared to this. She forced herself to look, too, trying to see if she could find any of the beauty that Andrew seemed to be enjoying, but the view still, inexplicably, terrified her. 

A particularly long flash of lightning illuminated the street for more than a split second, the brightness growing past what the other flashes had achieved; judging from a loud, shattering bang they heard somewhere close by, it must have hit something. The grey sheet of rain was illuminated and, in the moment her eyes adjusted to the brightness, a second before it faded again, Elena saw them: grey figures, dozens of them, moving back and forth through the rain as though there was a busy street out there instead of a deserted one. She could make out the shape of their clothing, if they were male or female; some of them even appeared to be children. The haze of rain obscured any colouring or distinguishing features, but Elena knew, even with that limited glimpse of them, that she couldn’t have imagined it, that it couldn’t have been a trick of the rain. She got further confirmation when Andrew turned to her, his blue eyes wide.

“Did you see that?” he asked, breathless, and she knew her own shocked look gave him his answer before she had even replied.

“Yes, I – what was that? Are there people out there?”

Andrew had to wait for another rumble of thunder to fade before he spoke again. They were speaking as quietly as possible, but with the storm it still amounted to a near shout. 

“There can’t be! They would be mad to be out in this! Besides, there was nobody on this street before. Where did they all come from?”

“I don’t know!” Elena said desperately. She remembered how the hairs on the back of her neck had been prickling as they had walked down the street, how she had been certain they were being watched, followed. “Marcel, this isn’t good. I don’t like this. I don’t think we should be here.”

“This is _insane_ ,” Andrew said, though whether he was agreeing with her or whether he was saying it out of excitement, she didn’t know. “We can’t move. We can’t go out in this. And do you really want to be out there with them, whatever they are?”

Elena shook her head. She wanted to argue, wanted to insist that they knew what they were – people, just ordinary people – but she knew she’d be lying to herself. Clearly Andrew had had the same thought as her; the instinctive knowledge that whatever was out there, it was neither human nor a trick of the lightning. They watched in silence as another flicker of lightning lit up the street, this time only briefly, but enough that they caught another glance at the figures moving through the rain. Elena wanted to look away but found she couldn’t; she was convinced they were getting closer, though none of them seemed to have noticed the pair of them huddling in the doorway. At first she had been convinced they had been on the opposite side of the street, but now she was convinced they were moving across the road, closer to their hiding place. 

She dragged her eyes away from the street, looking at Andrew. He was still staring out into the rain, his eyes wider than normal, his mouth slightly open. 

“Marcel,” she whispered, but her voice was lost in the storm. She tugged his arm, forcing herself to speak louder. “ _Marcel_!”

He looked at her then, something dreamy vanishing from his eyes. They focused on her and he frowned in confusion, as though wondering why she looked so panicked.

“Quit staring!” she pleaded, tightening her grip on his arm. “They’ll notice us!”

“They’ll…?” Andrew began, looking as though he were going to turn his attention back to them again, and Elena pulled on his arm, pulling him a step closer.

“I don’t want them to notice us,” she said, and finally it seemed to register with him – he nodded, keeping his eyes on her.

“They were getting closer,” he said. “I thought they were getting closer.”

“We can’t look at them,” Elena told him. “We have to just wait until the storm clears, and then we’re running back. I don’t care.”

Andrew nodded, and they didn’t take their eyes off one another until several minutes after the thunder had rolled into the distance, and the rain had stopped even spitting. They stepped cautiously out into the street and kept their eyes on the ground as they hurried down the soaking pathways and alleys, splashing through puddles and leaping over flooded gutters. Throughout the entire journey they saw nobody else. 

It didn’t need to be discussed – Andrew didn’t go out to the radio that night. Instead they huddled up together and slept fitfully, awakening every time they thought they heard rain.


End file.
